Scented Memories
by LobsangLudd
Summary: Aidan has loved Josh all his life.  Reincarnation fic, repeated character death.


**Scented Memories**

Aidan has loved Joshua all his life. When the war comes and Joshua enlists to fight for the colonies, Aidan signs up without a thought the same day, not because he wants to protect Joshua, or due to some previously unseen patriotism, but because he simply can not conceive of Joshua being farther away from him than down the street. Joshua is his very best friend. And if his friendship is starting to have more carnal leanings lately, well that doesn't bear thinking about.

War is terrible though and Aidan finds that it is a full time job keeping Joshua as the sweet innocent man he was back in Boston. Sometimes when the others are asleep he will climb into Joshua's bedroll and hold him to keep the nightmares away. One of those nights Joshua leans up and kisses him, quick and chaste, but it makes Aidan's lips tingle for hours afterward. They never speak of it, but Joshua begins to smile again and Aidan begins making plans for after the war.

Then there is an awful battle. Aidan sees Joshua take a bullet between the eyes before he's attacked by some sort of animal. When he wakes up into his new life his first words are to scream Joshua's name. His new father, Bishop, apologizes. Tells him that he would have saved Joshua if he had known what he meant to Aidan but now it is too late. That is when Aidan really dies.

* * *

Aidan doesn't expect to ever see Joshua again. He knows reincarnation happens on occasion, but the general consensus is that it's too rare to be counted on. He throws himself into his new family, Enjoys the slaughter. It's a game for them. He and Marcus have a friendly rivalry, body count, creativity, duration of kills. The humans declare civil war and the playing field expands. Wars are fantastic, everyone picks a side and it is basically a free for all costume party. Marcus suggests that they try and see who can have a higher body count using human means so on a dreary drizzly day they line up in their gray uniforms with a couple of Mississippi rifles to go into battle.

He recognizes Joshua a half second after he slams the bayonet under his sternum, holds him as his life ebbs away for the second time.

* * *

Aidan is on the lookout after that. Marcus and he are no longer close, Marcus has a new friend and Aidan has a new purpose. He searches, praying that Joshua will turn up again, somewhere. Bishop allows him to lead the pack when they have a large slaughter so he can check to make sure Joshua isn't among the appetizers. The others in his family don't understand. Bishop doesn't even understand, though he plays along, placating his favorite child. Against all odds he finds Joshua when he sees him watching from a window in a sanitarium where people go to die from consumption. Aidan sprints through the corridors checking the rooms until he sees Joshua sitting up in a bed waiting for him. He looks so frail and sick that Aidan nearly cries. Joshua gives him a weak smile and asks what took him so long. Aidan smiles back and asks if Joshua remembers him. No. But Joshua has been dreaming about Aidan all his life and he has been waiting. Joshua tells him that he had worried he would die before Aidan found him.

Bishop comes to meet Joshua but tells Aidan there is nothing he can do. Joshua's body has been wasting away for too long, he wouldn't survive the turn. All he can do is wait for the end. That's the day that Bishop loses his godlike omnipotence in Aidan's eyes. Aidan still follows him, still serves him, but it's never the same.

He has six months with Joshua. Joshua is far too weak for more than gentle dry pecks, but Aidan sits with him every hour that he isn't feeding. Aidan tells him stories about all of the amazing things he's seen and Joshua smiles and swears they will go see them together some day. In another life. Joshua dies alone one night while Aidan is hunting his dinner. By the time he gets back they have already stripped the bed.

* * *

When he sees Joshua again he looks different. Dashing. Strong. He is part of the Lafayette Escadrille in The Great War, displaced American fighter pilots flying for the French military. The danger and excitement have given him an exuberant sort of confidence and he wears it well, not a hint of arrogance he's just quietly comfortable in his own skin. When he sees Aidan for the first time he smiles and tells him he's late. He still doesn't really remember but he has been having the dreams for a long time and says it feels like he has been waiting all of his life. When Aidan calls him Joshua he laughs and tells him he can start calling him Josh.

The first time they make love it is frantic and awkward, trying desperately to stay quiet as they couple in a disused storage shed. It the most intense experience of Aidan's life to date. They recklessly fall asleep afterward and when Aidan wakes up the next morning he's alone. He spends the better part of the morning searching while being careful not to let anyone know that he is looking for Josh. Its over eight hours before someone thinks to tell him the Josh was shot down in a pre-dawn raid before Aidan even woke up.

* * *

The next time he sees Josh is in the middle of a slaughter. It's a wedding in Chicago. He looks up from the neck of the Best Man and sees Josh staring, trying to back away, shielding the bride behind him. His bride, this is his wedding they have crashed. Josh looks almost betrayed rather than terrified.

Aidan tries to approach but Josh understandably backs away. One of the newer vampires moves to attack Josh and Aidan loses his shit rushing to defend him. By the time Bishop has pulls them apart Josh and the new Mrs. Josh have escaped.

Aidan tracks him down. How could he not? Searching for Josh has become his life's purpose. When he finds him Josh freaks, he and the Mrs. skip town in the middle of the night. Aidan finds them again but doesn't approach them, just watches from afar keeping an eye on things. He tells himself that Josh is happy and doesn't need him this time around.

Josh's wife leaves him for an ex marine five years after the wedding, says he makes her feel safe. Josh becomes an alcoholic and ends up killing himself. Marcus makes an offhanded remark that he must have been pretty determined to die to do it in such a gruesome fashion. Aidan beats him so badly that he was recovering for over a week. Bishop looks the other way.

Aidan has his first flirtation with his alternative lifestyle after Josh's passing. He holes himself up in a rural cabin with 21 days worth of blood in a special refrigerator. He lasts almost two weeks before the hunger is unbearable and he kills a hiker.

* * *

When Aidan sees Marcus and his cronies hassling a Werewolf he almost turns to walk away. Aidan has no love of Weres. He has no love for Marcus either though and they are supposed to be keeping an especially low profile at the moment in light of the recent vampire craze in popular culture, so he goes it intervene. When he sees that the Were is Josh he almost kills Marcus outright, the only thing that stops him is his fear of scaring Josh off again. Aidan shoos the vampires away and offers to buy Josh a coffee.

Josh refuses to admit to the dreams, but Aidan suspects that he has them and his rational mind just isn't ready to add "Sex Dream Psychic" to his monster resume. Still, they have the same easy camaraderie they had as two young living men. Josh refuses to admit to any underlying attraction and Aidan is fine with that. Well not fine so much as he tolerates it because he wants nothing more than for Josh to be happy. So he continues to have one night stands and to try to help Josh with his social life, and when Josh agrees to be roommates he is beyond ecstatic but is very careful to cultivate a "two platonic dudes sharing rent" attitude so he doesn't scare Josh off.

It's hard when Josh starts dating and Aidan finds himself needing to be elsewhere on the nights Josh has managed to coax a woman back to the townhouse, but he actually isn't even resentful of it. He is legitimately happy that his friend has ended his sexual drought and Josh is more relaxed for it. Aidan even gets to know the girls sometimes and on one occasion made one breakfast. He is the picture of non-jealousy.

Until the night that he and Josh watch a documentary of the Lafayette Escadrille on the History Channel and Josh pounces on him during the second commercial break. After that Aidan is quite possessive and Josh has to cancel the date he lined up for later in the week citing unforeseen homosexuality. He actually says that and the girl laughs so hard that she forgets to be mad. She does however tell all the other orderlies who tell the nurses who tell the cafeteria workers who tell the doctors and when Josh and Aidan come in after their day off everyone applauds and there is a chorus of "about time"s. After that they sort of skip right over dating from two dudes sharing a kitchen to quasi-married. Josh doesn't seem to mind the swift transition.

Josh starts using his giant brain to make things easier on Aidan. He builds a lab in the basement and reads everything he can find about blood. He starts experimenting adding hormones and chemicals to the blood to make it more satisfying. He doesn't really get it to the point where it is as good as blood from the source, but Aidan's slips do become fewer and fewer. Aidan takes the formula to Bishop who admits that it might have some potential and then reminds Aidan once again that he can't turn Josh in his Were-ified state and that this sham of a relationship will only end in heartbreak.

Aidan finds a gray hair on Josh during the afterglow of thirtieth birthday morning sex. He freaks out a little bit and ends up blowing off their plans to spend the rest of the day contacting all of the immortals he knows about the success rate of Were-vamp hybrids. He has sleep on the couch that night and doesn't even find anything useful. The next morning Josh tells him to relax, one gray hair doesn't mean Josh has a foot in the grave. They will have years to figure everything out. Aidan allows himself to be comforted and schedules a make up birthday dinner.

Two years later Josh dies of a heart attack triggered by the change. Bishop tells Aidan he is actually very lucky as most Werewolves don't make it a year, let alone nine. Aidan refuses to speak to or see him after that. Bishop allows it.

* * *

Josh died over 250 years ago and hasn't been seen since. Aidan stops looking after Boston, he doesn't think he could take that again. Instead he goes to school to learn all the things Josh knew and continue his work. The blood has gotten better and better. It's still not quite the same as feeding live, but he hasn't killed anyone in nearly a century, it's even tolerable cold and can be frozen indefinitely. It's good enough that he has a small following of vampires who drink it and try to be better. Hell, Bishop admitted he was on to something and started small time production, packaging it in soda cans and dark beer bottles so vampires can drink in public if it becomes necessary.

Aidan became a bit of a hermit after Josh died, but with urban centers getting more and more populous, it is hard for him to get away. He gets a posting on Helios II, a space station orbiting Mercury, researching the magnetic field and chemical composition of the Sun. There are only about fifty people on the whole station and they are all introverted scientists so they mostly leave him alone. A supply ship comes once every two and a half years, and Bishop makes sure there is always a vampire on the crew to keep an eye on the blood supply make sure Aidan doesn't need anything. Aidan usually leaves a note for them and makes himself scarce.

Usually Bishop will have some sort of gift left in Aidan's quarters by the supply vampire. Books and movies are most common, though he has also gotten vampire porn, blood prototypes Bishop's scientists have developed, video games, and once human gay porn. Aidan was a little horrified that Bishop picked out mortal porn for him at the time, but he ended up kind of liking it. It isn't really his style but it is the kind of thing Josh would have liked, there is a pseudo plot and lots of kissing and declarations of love. Bishop also sent him a photograph of him and Josh that had been in the paper when Josh was 28 with a note that said one of the archeologists had found it while excavating a library in the ruins of Old Boston. Aidan almost broke his silence to thank him.

The supply ship comes on his 500th death day. Aidan locks himself in an observation deck and tells everyone he is making delicate measurements and can't be disturbed. He ends up staying there until nearly the next morning, long after the supply ship has come an gone. When he gets back to his door there is an envelope with his name written on it in Bishop's old fashioned calligraphy. He tosses it onto the pile of instruments and notebooks he's carrying and punches in his locking code one handed. When the door opens the familiar earthy smell causes him to drop 1.6 million credits worth of solar cartography equipment on the floor as he grabs for Bishops note.

It's an old fashioned birthday card. The picture on the front is of a husky wearing a party hat and the caption reads "some days you just feel so **dog**gone old." Inside in the same too-fancy lettering from the envelope is a message from Bishop. "You're puppy wandered into one of our house parties this week. I have already explained the situation so I suggest you take advantage of his healthy human state while you can. If he isn't Family by the time I come on the next supply run I will turn him for you. We are all sick of your moping" Aidan stumbles over his equipment in his rush to enter the room.

He is there on the bed asleep, slumped over on his side as if he was waiting for Aidan when the exhaustion overtook him. He isn't a creature anymore but Aidan can still faintly smell the wolf on him. He can smell the clean soap that Josh used two lives ago when he was terrified of Aidan, and the musk and gasoline of their one night in the storage shed. The sweet lingering antiseptic smell of the sanitarium takes him a moment to place and the black powder of a muzzle loaded musket rifle is so faint he nearly misses it. Under it all is the smell of Aidan himself. Aidan from before. Of molten silver and sweat and warmth. Aidan who didn't know about vampires. Aidan who wanted nothing more than a silver shop of his own and to spend the rest of his life with his best friend. He smelled the fear he had felt lying in Joshua's bedroll all those nights. Fear they would be discovered, fear their next battle would be their last, fear that Joshua would come to his senses one day and cast Aidan away.

Josh began to stir when Aidan sat on the bed beside him. He smiled sleepily at Aidan. "You're late"

"I know, I'm sorry. But I'm here now."


End file.
